by Robert West
Yep, dreams are kind of tricky, thought Beamer as he rummaged through the tree ship looking for wrapping paper. Things happen — unexpected things, scary things — and it’s easy to get discouraged. But Beamer was just beginning to learn that, no matter what happened, you couldn’t give up on God. After all, if God made us — each one — special for a reason, he had to have a plan for us, right?
Where is that paper? Beamer asked himself. Tonight was Christmas Eve, and he still had to wrap and deliver the presents for Ghoulie and Scilla as well as his new friends at church. Here it was, his favorite time of year, and he’d almost missed it! But then, as things turned out, he’d probably helped give Solomon Parker the best Christmas present he’d ever gotten. What could be better than getting your life back? Sol had also gotten his sister back. Chances are they’ll be sharing Christmas dinner together.
Beamer was sure he had brought the wrapping paper out to the tree ship yesterday, along with the box of presents. He remembered going through the attic. That’s where I must have left it.
As Beamer tightroped the branches to his roof, his thoughts returned to Sol — and Weenoh too. After all, the way his people had altered their dreams to create a whole new civilization was totally awesome. Yep, no question about it — if you trusted, even in the darkest times, that the Lord wouldn’t desert you, you just might find that God has laid out another dream for you even bigger than the one you first imagined. All you had to do was hang on for the ride.
Beamer scrambled up the roof and stepped through the window. The afternoon sun filtered through the branches of the tree and cast a dappled glow on the great web. For a moment the web looked like a city as seen from an airplane, with lights shimmering gold amid shadows of the night. It took his breath away. Then he saw something else that really sucked out his breath.
A cold chill sizzled down Beamer’s back like frozen lightning. The scientific equipment that had surrounded the web all these months — that buzzing, blipping, beeping, flashing electronic wonderland that had made their attic look like something out of a sci-fi movie — was dead. It was a strangely chilling sight — like seeing a room full of mummies in an Egyptian tomb. They no longer looked like machines, for each was cocooned in a thick coat of spider silk, as if they had been flies caught in the web and painfully deprived of their life juices.
Beamer stepped back out of the attic as his eyes scanned the dark ceiling. There was only one explanation for all this — Molgotha . . . was back!!
Character Bios
Priscilla Bruzelski:
Age: 12 / 6th grade, Hair/Eyes: dishwater-blonde/green, Height: 4’9”
“Scilla” refuses to be called by her full name because it’s too prissy for this tomboy. She is smaller than your average twelve-year-old, but she makes up for her small stature with a fiercely independent, feisty personality. She lives with her grandmother whom she was sent to live with when her single mother remarried. She has a half-brother named Dashiell who lives with her mother and her mother’s new husband. Her grandmother takes her to church every Sunday out of tradition. Scilla loves climbing trees, football, basketball, and anything that’s not girly. She doesn’t get along with the popular girls at school, but she doesn’t mind. She has strong opinions and will fight for what she believes is right.
Benson McIntyre:
Age: 13 / 7th grade, Hair/Eyes: short, wavy, sandy brown hair/blue, Height: 5’
“Beamer,” named from the famous “Beam me up Scotty” line in Star Trek, has an interest in all things science fiction. He hates his given name, so don’t call him Benson. You might get a response in wry, sarcastic humor from this energetic teenager. He recently moved with his family from Southern California to Middle America. He has a younger brother named Michael and an older sister named Erin. His father, referred to as “Mr. Mac,” is a theater director, and his mother is a pediatrician called “Dr. Mac.” He loves playing on the computer, likes keeping up with the times, and considers himself on the cutting edge. Coming from a strong Christian family, he analyzes all problems with deep spiritual thought. His love for science extends to his speech, as he often speaks in sci-fi space metaphors.
Garfunkel Ives:
Age: 12 / 7th grade, Hair/Eyes: black/brown, Height: 4’10”
“Ghoulie” got his name from the wide-eyed look he makes when he is excited. He’s an intelligent boy who skipped a grade. He’s small for his age and is the typical nerd who loves gadgets and computers, which makes him fodder for bullies. The constant bullying makes him jaded and sarcastic, and he would love to get revenge on the bullies. His father is a successful CFO of a large corporation and his mother is a highly-respected lawyer. His parents have little time for a spiritual life — or him — and have left his upbringing to the nanny. His parents have also left him with an extensive computer and gadget collection which he loves to use to quench his thirst for scientific knowledge.
1
Flight of the Pink Carpet
Beamer didn’t have a clue where he was. He just woke up and . . . boing! — he was circling in the air around a castle. He’d have preferred an F – 18 or a stealth fighter. What did he get? A flying carpet. Talk about obsolete! He could forget Mach one. “Skateboard one” was probably pushing it. What was worse, the carpet had a temper. How do you hang on to these things? “Whoa!” he yelped as he was suddenly flipped into the air. He managed to grab hold of the carpet’s fringe just as it dived through a large window in the castle. “Whaaaaoooooooooo,” he exclaimed as his stomach turned inside out.
Incidentally, the castle was pink . . . yeah, pink, as in bubble gum, peppermint sticks, and Barbie toys. Come to think of it, so was the carpet — pink, that is. He hated pink. That was the color his big sister, Erin, wore all the time. Frankly, if he wasn’t dipping through the hallways of the castle and holding on for dear life, he’d never have taken a flying pink carpet seriously.
The next thing Beamer knew, he was on the floor looking up at a pink crystal chandelier about the size of his house. Whoa! If that thing falls on me, I’ll be a sparkly porcupine — not to mention dead. It seemed like a good idea to get out from under it, but, for some reason, he couldn’t move. He felt like he was wearing a straitjacket. He tried to wiggle free — no such luck. Then he looked down. That rascally carpet had wrapped around him like a cocoon. Great! Now he was a bug in a rug! “A little breathing room, please!” he called out to the carpet.
That was when Beamer noticed that he was rolled up at the foot of a huge pink staircase. It was shaped sort of like an hourglass, narrower in the middle than at the top or bottom. For all he knew, this could have been the very staircase where Cinderella lost her glass slipper. Why anyone would wear a glass slipper was beyond him. One step is all it would take for his sister to crunch it into smithereens. Then she could forget being found by the prince who was posing as a would-be shoe salesman. Of course, if the only way this prince guy could recognize her was by her shoe size, he probably needed glasses as thick as binoculars. Either that or the fairy’s spell on Cinderella included some major plastic surgery.
Suddenly Beamer heard loud crunching and splintering. He jerked his head up to see an elephant swinging on the chandelier. Yep, you guessed it — a pink elephant! The big pachyderm was filling the air with pink glass like a hailstorm.
Then Beamer heard something groaning and then wailing in a high pitch. The chandelier is about to fall! Beamer twisted and turned, trying to get the carpet rolling. But instead of rolling across the room, he started rolling up the stairs! Hey, what happened to gravity? You can’t roll up stairs! But then, what else could he expect from a flying carpet? “Ow! Ow! Hey! Whoa!” he yelped as he bumped along, lickety-split, up the stairs. The staircase must have been much taller than he thought. He just kept on bumping and rolling without coming to the top of the stairs. Of course, he wasn’t seeing things all that well. Spinning around in that rug was making him pretty dizzy. Everything was swirling around like a pink tornado.
Be
amer finally thudded to a stop. As the whirl of pink in his head slowed down, he noticed that he was no longer on the stairs. He also began having second thoughts about what he was wrapped up in. It wasn’t a rug or a carpet or a straitjacket anymore. He was in a cocoon — a pink cocoon! What was worse, he was stuck in the middle of a huge pink spiderweb! He twisted and kicked, trying to break out of the cocoon. The web shook beneath him. Pretty soon it was shaking even more. He strained to tilt his head back. Then he saw it — a pink nightmare whose eight legs were churning in perfect order across the web. Soon he was going to be one big Slurpee for that hairy spider behemoth.
Soon it would be all over — no obituary, no tombstone, no nothing. Since none of this could possibly be real, Beamer MacIntyre wasn’t even going to be history — he was just one more fantasy character crumpled and tossed in the trash can. He flailed about one last time, trying to escape —
Beamer thumped on a hard surface. “Ow!” he yelped in pain. Anxiously, he fought the confinement of the cocoon. Finally, he threw it off. But it wasn’t a cocoon anymore. It was a blanket — his sister’s pink quilt! Yech! No wonder everything was pink. His blanket must have been in the wash and his mom snuck his sister’s on his bed under the bedspread. He looked up and saw the ceiling with the ice-cream-cone water stain. He was back in his bedroom, on the floor next to his bed. It was all a dream — a silly old dream. He sighed. Talk about twisted fairy tales!
“Beamer, you’ll be late for school!” his mom called from the kitchen downstairs. “Stove, plate fo’ah low. Toastah own!” he heard her say. The only way to get the kitchen appliances to work in this house was to talk to them. But you had to talk to them nicely and in a Southern accent. Californian wouldn’t cut it. That’s where Beamer had come from — California. Living on Murphy Street in Middle America was turning out to be a whole new ball game.
“Mo-o-o-o-ommm!” a shrill voice shouted at the same time. “Where are my pink Nikes?” It was Beamer’s big sister, Erin, otherwise known as Zero, Zero, Zero (0,0,0). Those are the coordinates for the center of the universe, which is what she thought she was. It was totally disgusting. As far as she was concerned, everyone and everything else in the universe revolved around her.
Also, at the same time, Beamer heard alternating thumping and slapping sounds on the staircase. That was the sound of a strange quadruped named Michael, his nine-year-old brother, who always came up the steps on all fours.
The last set of sounds came from his dad in the shower: “Too hot, too hot!” he said to the plumbing. “Caolder, caolder, caolder . . . ahhhh, jaust raight.”
This was why Beamer didn’t have many sleepovers at his house.
During history class, it finally occurred to Beamer where at least part of his dream had come from. It should have been obvious. It was the web! — his web! Nearly two stories tall and as wide as the house, the famous MacIntyre Web was the nightmare in the attic — the greatest entomological mystery this side of Cleveland.
Up until Christmas, the scientists experimenting on the web in their attic weren’t even sure that it was a real web. Some thought it was man-made, somebody’s joke or a hobby project or a mad scientist’s experiment. But back on Christmas Eve, Molgotha, the web maker, had returned. She’d spun a cocoon around every piece of scientific equipment surrounding the web. Then she sucked the electronic life out of them, leaving them totally useless, as dead as the flies in the little web under the corner gutter.
So now, scientists from all over the country were in the MacIntyre attic, hovering around the web, hooking up this and that sensor. More than ever, the attic looked like the bridge of Darth Vader’s Star Destroyer. Cameras now monitored the web 24 – 7, and multiple alarm systems registered every movement. The only reason the MacIntyres were still willing and able to live in the house was because the scientists calculated that all of the security systems gave the spider only “one chance in a hundred” of getting down where they lived. Of course, that “one chance in a hundred” was covered by family prayers every night. How many spiders do you know of that get into people’s prayers?
That was three months ago. Spring vacation was only a half circle of the moon away, and still nobody knew who or why or what Molgotha was all about. Part of Beamer hoped they never would. It was kind of cool having a big mystery in your attic, except for the fact that it gave you the heebie-jeebies every time you got near it. You could never lose the feeling that Molgotha was up there somewhere, hiding in the shadows, smackin’ her chops for your yummy red corpuscles.
There’s a Spaceship in My Tree!: Episode I
Softcover ISBN 0310714257
Beamer, age 13, who speaks only Californian, is an alien in the world of Middle America, exiled to a bizarre, ancient house on a mysterious street that may or may not exist on any map. With the help of a nerdy African-American kid named Ghoulie, a gangly tomboy named Scilla, and a miraculous, broken-down tree house shaped like a spaceship, he bales the indigenous life forms in his new home, from bullying creatures to the strange inhabitants of dark castles, subterranean caverns, and a spider web the size of a house, to discover how God gives a distinctive purpose to each uniquely designed human being.
Available now at your local bookstore!
Escape from the Drooling Octopod!: Episode III
Softcover ISBN 0310714273
The Star-Fighters, under a ack from pink goblins and Molgotha, a drooling giant octopod, must save a girl locked in a "pink palace." In a wacky adventure which takes them to a pink planet, through subterranean civilizations and into a modern day Dr. Franken-stein's laboratory, the Star-Fighters learn of the temptation to play God when faith is challenged and discover beauty in the most unlikely beasts.
Available now at your local bookstore!
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